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Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop

Overview

What is Tableau Desktop?

Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual…

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Recent Reviews

Analytics with Tableau

7 out of 10
February 27, 2024
We use Tableau to generate daily and weekly reports for our business module to generate our key performance indicators. These insights we …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 30 features
  • Report sharing and collaboration (157)
    9.3
    93%
  • Drill-down analysis (159)
    9.0
    90%
  • Formatting capabilities (162)
    9.0
    90%
  • Customizable dashboards (166)
    8.8
    88%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Tableau Creator

$70.00

On Premise
Per User / Per Month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.tableau.com/products/desktop

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $70 per month
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Product Demos

Tableau Desktop Tutorial | Tableau Desktop Training | Online Tableau Desktop Training - Youtube

YouTube

- Tableau Demo: Quick Tutorial to Getting Started with Tableau Desktop

YouTube

Tableau Desktop Naming Conventions Part 1

YouTube

Tableau Desktop Introduction Part 1

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

8.5
Avg 8.1

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.9
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.6
Avg 8.3

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.6
Avg 8.0

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.8
Avg 8.5

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.4
Avg 7.9

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

8.8
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is Tableau Desktop?

Tableau Desktop supports data-driven decisions by helping users to answer questions more quickly, solve harder problems more easily, and uncover new insights.

Tableau Desktop connects directly to hundreds of data sources, both on-premises or in the cloud, with the goal of making it easier to start analyses. Interactive dashboards, drag and drop functionality, and natural language queries help users of all skill levels quickly discover actionable insights, all from its visual interface. Users can ask deeper questions by quickly building calculations, adding trend lines and seeing statistical summaries, or clustering data to see relationships.


Tableau Desktop Video

In this video, the TrustRadius team will be discussing the top business intelligence tools available: Qlik Sense, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and IBM Cognos Analytics.

Tableau Desktop Competitors

Tableau Desktop Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.

Tableau Desktop starts at $70.

IBM Cognos Analytics, SAP Lumira Discovery, and Qlik Sense are common alternatives for Tableau Desktop.

Reviewers rate Report sharing and collaboration highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of Tableau Desktop are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(2259)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(51-75 of 194)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 11, 2020

Good for a lone wolf

Verified User
Analyst in Quality Assurance
Entertainment Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Instantly changes views of data to slice and dice depending on need.
  • Map feature is fantastic.
  • Tableau is very customizable, which means that a lot of simple analytics tools have to be built from scratch.
  • Importing data is not always intuitive to a lay person like me.
December 09, 2019

Tableau Desktop - The nuts and bolts of it.

Ron Rothstain | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ron Rothstain
Assistant Director, Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and Innovation
USC Marshall School of Business (Higher Education, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Love the interface. It's very smooth and easy to connect multiple numbers of data points
  • Provided a lot of self-learning tutorials which are easy to follow
  • You can display info in different ways (categorical versus numerical)
  • User friendly and has clean display
  • Sometimes takes a while to refresh
  • A bit expensive
  • Pullind data, particularly if you are not familiar with SQL or other query languages, can be a bit challenging
December 09, 2019

Data management and visual precedence!

Simol Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Simol Shah
Quality Control Engineer
Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Consumer Services, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Pull-down menus and/or split commands for sorting and data manipulation.
  • Great pricing for the desktop version, online is still less preferable though.
  • Automatically connects .csv files instead of a browser.
  • Four-phase implementation training in order to understand all the processes to ensure literacy of the software could facilitate a better process.
  • To match queries it takes a lot of effort in data manipulation.
  • Courses and annual fees leave a strenuous bill burden on those who are beginning to implement the quota into their startup.
October 23, 2019

Great for Data-Viz-Wizzes, Painful for Others

Verified User
Analyst in Marketing
Telecommunications Company, 201-500 employees
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Allows for complex dashboards to be made and then presented to less-technical audiences
  • Stories help highlight important information in the information, allowing a presentation to stand on its own without having to be explained in person
  • Recommends different visualizations based on the type of data inputted
  • Very steep learning curve for those who haven't used it previously.
  • Because it's a powerful tool, getting it to do simple things can be extremely difficult.
  • A jack-of-all-trades solution, sometimes it's hard to find or create industry-specific visualizations, such as NPS gauges.
October 07, 2019

Turn Tables Into Vistas of Visualization with Tableau Desktop

BP
Benjamin Plotkin
Technical Project Manager
California State University, Northridge (Education Management, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau's suite of powerful data visualization tools allows users to create static and interactive dashboards with the ease of a drag-and-drop interface. It can help users avoid common data visualization pitfalls.
  • Tableau handily deals with millions of rows of data, from various data sources, including spreadsheets and SQL databases. This allows users to integrate disparate data sources that may have been difficult to connect otherwise.
  • Tableau's interface allows data analysts of all experience levels to quickly begin producing compelling and useful analysis and visualizations. As a user gains experience, Tableau's feature set continues to keep pace.
  • Pricing at scale is inordinately expensive. One must pay for the best, it seems, but better large-volume pricing would be appreciated!
  • When assembling a worksheet, there is only limited room for columns, and when that capacity is exceeded, columns are auto-collapsed into merged placeholders, which cannot be easily inspected.
  • Tableau is so feature-rich that it can feel impossible to master. While the vendor does provide training outreach, an emphasis on interactive tool-tips and other forms of "hands-on" training would be a welcome addition to the application.
October 03, 2019

Still the Industry Standard for BI

GH Powell | TrustRadius Reviewer
GH Powell
Consultant
Zuar LLC (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Lots of Data Connections
  • Easy Visualizations
  • Well supported in the community
  • Flexible tool - many ways to do things.
  • Error messaging is ambiguous
  • Confusing interface - many ways to do the same thing
  • Limited Crosstabs
  • Dashboard layouts don't allow cutting and pasting of objects
  • Despite what they try to demonstrate, big datasets still don't perform as quickly as you might expect them to
September 19, 2019

The best tool for visualization and storytelling

Verified User
Partner in Product Management
Information Technology and Services Company, 51-200 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Easy to import data from multiple sources
  • Easy to drag and drop and create various dimension
  • Easy to build a storyboard
  • A simple knowledgebank to get people started is essential.
  • The pricing could be slightly lower for individual users
  • The calculated fields could be made simpler
September 16, 2019

Tableau Desktop - iReviewed

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Very user friendly, even a beginner would not have problem in understanding how to use it.
  • Various types of charts are available.
  • Sharing the dashboards is easy.
  • Creating a dashboard is pretty easy and only Tableau has storytelling options which have helped me in my presentations.
  • Raw data downloading behind the dashboard - The format of the data that we download would be in a very confusing format.
  • Format matching is pretty much manual for various charts that we create.
  • Data cleaning, wrangling & formatting has a lot of room for improvement.
  • Alerting system from the dashboard is not available yet.
September 13, 2019

The Dominant Tool, But Will It Stay That Way?

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Higher Education Company, 51-200 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Easy to learn.
  • Analyzes your data and recommends potential reports.
  • User-friendly interface.
  • Expensive compared to other tools.
  • Hooking into data beyond CSV can get complicated.
  • Entire Tableau ecosystem (Desktop, Server, etc) is overly complicated.
September 13, 2019

Tableau Desktop still is my go-to product in a crowded BI tool market

John Rome | TrustRadius Reviewer
John Rome
Deputy CIO and BI Strategist
Arizona State University (Higher Education, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Visualization of data.
  • Easily connects to local or a variety of data sources or APIs.
  • Short learning curve to come up to speed.
  • The pricing model has been tricky at times.
  • Tableau corporation doesn't do a great job with the inventory of those who own licenses.
  • Performance has been an issue at times.
August 09, 2019

Tableau is the market leader when it comes to Interactive Data Analysis and Visualization

Rahul Malik | TrustRadius Reviewer
Rahul Malik
Senior Team Lead
Wipro Limited (Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Tableau offers incredible data visualization tools and the ability to parse massive data-sets in a very limited time. Its plethora of different chart formats and tools allow you to show data almost any way, making it easy to adapt visualizations to differing needs and tastes.
  • Tableau is great for creating a combined dashboard with multiple databases as the source. This is one of the main features that the Tableau can connect to almost any data source and import the data easily and quickly.
  • The support for natural language query is invaluable. It helps people of all skill levels quickly discover actionable insights because they don't have to learn any particular language to get on-board with it.
  • The charts and graphics that tableau makes are easy for even nonanalytical people to understand, ideal for end-users of information as well.
  • When we are importing data from multiple sources and the data is huge, it sometimes tends to lag and have also crashed sometimes.
  • Tableau Desktop lacks the basic functionality of cleaning and prepping the data to be imported in Tableau Desktop. This is one of the major features which it lacks, you need additional support from Tableau to get these things added.
  • It has the annoying habit that saved database connections must be re-authenticated every time you open the program, which is a complete waste of time and effort to do it, again and again, each time.
July 18, 2019

No tool is better than this for data visualization. A must have.

Akshaya Bhardwaj | TrustRadius Reviewer
Akshaya Bhardwaj
Consultant
WNS Global Services (Outsourcing/Offshoring, 10,001+ employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • It creates good dashboards.
  • Selecting the fields and metrics is quite easy. We can create the formulas for presenting any variable.
  • We can use this tool with R studio and SQL, which I think is the major power of this tool.
  • We can process huge data in a very limited time.
  • Output delivery of charts is also very efficient. For example, we can take the PDF of the charts, which is good, from other tools.
  • More statistical functions need to be introduced in it.
  • We can not clean the data through this tool.
  • While taking the data from multiple sources, it hangs sometimes which sometimes crashes the whole system.
July 15, 2019

Tableau is a good tool for those willing to invest the time

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology
Construction Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Can process large amounts of data.
  • Has lots of data connections to feed data.
  • Easy to set up basic reports and dashboards.
  • The Online and Server products make Tableau easy to use and share work with large groups (or small groups).
  • Now has the backing of Saleforce and that admired company culture.
  • The cost for Desktop and Server is extremely cost prohibitive.
  • Tableau is quick to blame the users when performance and processing speeds are poor, but in reality, Tableau needs to work on making the application lighter and more powerful. There is a tool to evaluate performance on each workbook.
  • Needs more data connectors.
  • It takes advanced training/knowledge to create advanced reports and dashboards. If you use it every day you can become advanced in a few months.
  • Training documentation and access to trading materials are lacking. Maybe they want youtube to be the main source of training?
June 30, 2019

Tableau Review

Jason Xiao | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jason Xiao
Senior Analyst, Fraud Data Science & Analytics
RBC (Banking, 10,001+ employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • User-friendly interface.
  • Good IT support and lots of resources.
  • Can publish reports to a server.
  • Quite expensive.
  • Limited functions in calculations.
  • Not support embedded SQL.
  • Not compatible well with Microsoft’s products.
June 20, 2019

Visualization made simple, and complex!

Clinton Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Clinton Shields
Health Information Analytics Analyst
Kings View Community Services, Inc. (Hospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Easy to use
  • Plenty of Customization options
  • Can be quick to pick up for average users
  • Supports some complex analytics
  • Integrates well with other software
  • expensive
  • does require some workarounds to solve sometimes simple analytics
  • training for product is also very expensive
June 03, 2019

Best solution for BI (features + price)

Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology
Machinery Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • It is easy to use.
  • It has many data connections (data sources).
  • It is multilanguage.
  • Tableau is easy to learn.
  • It is difficult to configure page layouts.
  • Complex data sources correlations are difficult to create.
  • The price could be better when compared to competitors.
June 02, 2019

Great data tool if you know how to use it

Verified User
Analyst in Marketing
Hospital & Health Care Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Pulling data from multiple sources.
  • Can handle large data sources, unlike Excel.
  • Pivoting data in more dimensions than Excel.
  • Difficult to learn and use.
  • Requires a lot of skill to create more developed visualizations and automated reporting.
  • An extremely expensive and over the top solution for small businesses.
May 29, 2019

Basic desktop data science and analytics are now awalaible

Michael Sadofyev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Michael Sadofyev
Data Management & Blockchain Senior Manager
PwC (Accounting, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • After basic training users can operate with Tableau by themselves.
  • Tableau is good for evaluating base data analytics and data science tasks.
  • In comparison to Ms PowerBL: fewer visuals in Tableau.
  • Fewer free versions and support documentation/examples in Tableau rather than in PowerBI.
May 22, 2019

Visualization is the Future

Maddie Cheasick | TrustRadius Reviewer
Maddie Cheasick
Senior Sales Partnerships Specialist
Sojern (Marketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • User-friendly, and made for visual learners.
  • The best tool for presentation purposes and actionable examples.
  • Good for using our data in a way that can be understood by everyone in the business.
  • It can be slow, as in loading slow and taking a while to switch from dashboard to dashboard.
May 21, 2019

Great visual tool for sharing data with others

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pros and Cons
  • Multiple data connections and blending
  • Ability to see recommendations for graphs
  • Ability to use API to create custom applications
  • Extension gallery needs more options
  • I think having the ability to use libraries like D3 into graphs
  • Hyper being able to handle multiple joins better
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